Su, Phi Hong. "'There’s No Solidarity' Nationalism and Belonging among Vietnamese and Immigrants in Berlin." Journal of , Vol. 12 No. 1, Winter 2017: (pp. 73- 100).

Nationalism and Belonging among Vietnamese Refugees and Immigrants in Berlin,

Germany

Sitting cross-legged on the floor of his one-room apartment in Berlin over a

steaming hot pot, Tùng poses a riddle: Why is it that in a competition of skill and

smarts, one Vietnamese will outperform one Japanese, but three Vietnamese will

never defeat three Japanese?1 Long, a family friend sitting to Tùng’s left,

interjects after an extended pause on my part: “There’s no solidarity.”

Tùng, who left his home in northern in his 20s, entered irregularly through a third country in the Schengen Zone of free movement in Europe.2 Without documentation or knowledge of the German language, Tùng relied on coethnics to help him find a service-sector job.3 Yet, he cautions that he tries to limit his interactions with other Vietnamese. I am exempted, however, because I am a “southerner” and therefore, he argues, live more freely as a result of the diluted reach of into the south. In this essay, I examine precisely such conceptions of coethnics as those articulated by Tùng. I focus on Berlin as a site that, during the Cold War, simultaneously received refugees fleeing the collapse of the Republic of Vietnam (RVN, a.k.a.

South Vietnam) to the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG, a.k.a. West Germany), as well as contract workers from the reunified Socialist Republic of Vietnam (SRV, a.k.a Vietnam) to the

German Democratic Republic (GDR, a.k.a. ). The 1989 fall of the

(Mauerfall) dramatically increased the chances of coethnics from separate migration streams encountering one another.4 In this context of reunified Germany, I ask: How do Vietnamese- origin individuals’ perceptions of coethnics complicate or reinforce social divisions?5

To the best of my knowledge, Berlin has the distinction of being the only site in which those ostensibly loyal as well as antagonistic to the SRV (1) arrived roughly simultaneously and (2) continue to reside in large numbers.6 This unique migration scenario enables a critical examination of problematic binaries such as communist/anticommunist, revolutionary/nonrevolutionary, defender/aggressor.7 I undertake this by firstly emphasizing how individuals treat such categories as rigid social facts. It is decidedly not my intention to reproduce these binaries; rather, I recognize that challenging certain narratives often require that researchers “nevertheless engage with the very concept they critique.”8 To fairly portray moments in which individuals in my study reify as well as contradict such binaries, I retain original uses of terms such as northerner/southerner and contract worker/, all the while recognizing that these categories do not map cleanly onto one another.

Based on 14 months of participant-observation between 2013—2016 and 46 in-depth interviews, I chart how Vietnamese-origin individuals in Berlin at times naturalize coethnic divisions as incidental or based on cultural differences, and at other times politicize and even criminalize perceived differences between northerners and southerners, contract workers and refugees. My findings follow in two parts: firstly, the discussion of expressed cultural differences draws on participant-observation and semi-structured interviews. Secondly, I utilize interviews only with those individuals who arrived in Germany before or shortly after the Mauerfall, a moment that presented tremendous opportunities for conflict and cooperation among coethnics.

Ultimately, moments of affirmation or breakdown of dualities such as communist/anticommunist reveal how reflect on and espouse understandings of nation and war history, and the very tangible and often contentious consequences for coethnic relations.

Overseas Vietnamese Communities and Relationships with Vietnam

This case study draws on and aims to contribute to work complicating established narratives of Vietnamese war histories and migratory pathways. Increasingly, scholars have

2 taken up Yến Lê Espiritu’s call in the inaugural JVS issue to “take seriously the range of

Vietnamese perspectives on the before and after of the ,” for instance, by centering refugee subject formation and commemorative activities even as they are embedded in and constrained by local, regional, and global processes. 9 In an alternative strategy, An Tuan Nguyen deemphasizes refugees altogether by focusing on a comparatively understudied migrant group:

Vietnamese professionals to the .10 In highlighting a group at the periphery of

Vietnamese and migration studies, Nguyen reveals ongoing and changing relationships between

Vietnam and countries of mass resettlement of Vietnamese. Of particular relevance to this author in this regard are studies of contract workers to the GDR and in what Gertrud

Hüwelmeier and Christina Schwenkel have termed, respectively, “socialist pathways of migration” and “socialist mobilities.”11 The circulations of people, ideas, and materials across socialist countries revealed by such scholarship fundamentally disrupt associations of with movement and mobility, and the inverse for . In studying contract workers and refugees simultaneously, I therefore build on Hüwelmeier’s and Schwenkel’s insights, while heeding how the refugee “not as legal classification but as an idea” persists in a context of varied migratory pathways to Berlin.12

Beyond surveying the gamut of individuals’ experiences, the aforementioned studies offer a second important corrective by analytically centering changing developments in the homeland. The introduction of “Renovation” [Đổi Mới] in 1986 has, among other consequences, improved opportunities for research that have been seized upon by Vietnamese studies scholars.13 Cultural production provides one critical line of investigation in light of the introduction of in Vietnam. In this vein, research by Kieu Linh Caroline

Valverde reveals how relationships between Vietnamese in the United States with their former

3 homeland shaped the politics of music production and dissemination. She notes, specifically, that music in the United States appeared “stagnant” by the mid-1990s, with a gaze affixed toward pre-1975 (South) Vietnam. This trend has started to shift against a backdrop of increasing exchange between Vietnamese overseas and Vietnam.14 This is not to suggest that Renovation comprehensively resolved any lingering antagonisms between Vietnam and exiles abroad: for instance, Hiroki Furuya argues that have reconciled return travel to

Vietnam with continuing opposition to the Vietnamese regime.15 Such nuances in relating to the homeland are further elaborated by Ashley Carruthers, who notes with some irony that among

Vietnamese in Sydney, “it is one thing for people to be able to buy pirated Vietnamese-produced variety shows and telemovies … and quite another to have an all-singing, all-dancing live show from Vietnam on the diasporic doorstep.”16 In Berlin, the perceived reach of the Vietnamese state in the embodied form of contract workers appear at refugees’ figurative and, sometimes, literal doorsteps. This complicates, in Carruthers’ terms, how “Little Saigons” abroad—and specifically, in Berlin—relate to the “Big Saigon” in Vietnam when its constituents have not established hegemony over what it means to be Vietnamese in the shared space of this postsocialist city.

At the heart of this essay are social relationships between Vietnamese-origin individuals and coethnics from different migration streams and region of origin. Here, I tackle social relationships in two ways: through (1) the construction of the coethnic other, and (2) accompanying capacities for conflict and cooperation. Firstly, I consider how Vietnamese depict themselves and coethnics in their imaginaries. Ivan Small’s study of remittances is an important reference for this, as he examines how Vietnamese in Vietnam envision overseas Vietnamese

“‘over there.’”17 Small forcefully argues that remittance relationships represent to the receiver in

4 Vietnam the “specter of an other—transformed by money from elsewhere—that one might have been and might still become.”18 Respondents in my study similarly engage in a romanticization of an unrealized path: in the opening vignette, Tùng’s idealization of the RVN reflects in how he imbues “south Vietnamese” bodies with political meaning. Unlike the individuals in Small’s study, however, Tùng occupies the same spatial reality as the coethnics he regards, thus raising the question of how these imaginaries are tempered or reproduced through interactions.

Secondly, the respondents in this study demonstrate ongoing potential for conflict over ideas of nation, history, and (anti)communism. This is similarly true of Vietnamese overseas communities in , , , and the United States.19 Yet, the potential for cooperation abroad, as well as in Vietnam, are often overlooked. An exception is Schwenkel’s study of a 2000 photo exhibit in Vietnam which gestures toward reconciliation, as the names of fallen photojournalists from the RVN were moved to a memorial slab for their “countrymen” from the former Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV., a.k.a. ).20 I return to this point in my discussion of good- and ill will among Vietnamese after the Mauerfall, but first provide a discussion of the research site and respondents.

Methodology

This paper is based on 14 months of participant observation participant-observation and semi-structured, in-depth interviews with boat refugees, former contract workers, their families who migrated through family reunification, and those who came undocumented after the

Mauerfall. Because I am interested in the period following the collapse of global communism for the second part of the findings, I restrict that part of the analysis to interview data with 46 individuals who came to Germany before or during 1992 in the great waves of migration from the former to reunifying Germany. However, I continue to draw on participant-

5 observation with immigrants and refugees who arrived as early as the 1970s and as recently as

2015. I conducted the interviews in Vietnamese, German, or some combination of the two. Each interview lasted an average of two hours, though in rare instances the interviews ran nearly five hours. I recruited interviewees through various sites across Berlin, including three Buddhist temples, an evangelical church, and two community organizations attended by former contract workers and/or refugees.21 For the purposes of this paper, I draw on ethnographic observations largely in the first part of the findings, and in a more limited capacity in the second part when my observations directly contradict or add nuance to respondents’ recounting of events during and after the Mauerfall.

The Vietnamese-origin individuals in this study included a roughly equal number of contract workers, boat refugees, and the families of both. While nearly all of the refugees and their families have German citizenship, only some former contract workers do, despite eligibility for naturalization. This may result, in part, because of naturalization laws requiring a certain level of knowledge of the German language, which the second wave of contract workers largely lacked in comparison to refugees. However, even some former contract workers who met the prerequisites for naturalization at times did not want to give up their Vietnamese passports, as one former contract worker explained to me, because he “always feel[s] a sense of pride” with his Vietnamese nationality. By our interview in 2016, Lâm had lived in Germany longer than he had in Vietnam, yet retained strong homeland ties. By contrast, most of the refugees sponsored their families over, and often had few close ties remaining in Vietnam. The refugees and those who arrived through family reunification largely work for German corporations, while former contract workers included many self-employed, unemployed, and, less often, employed.

Subject Position

6 In the course of studying relationships among coethnics of different migration streams and regions of origin, it became apparent that my own positionality impacted the types of access

I gained. A host of demographic characteristics and life experiences related to my class, gender, age, and linguistic capacities undoubtedly shaped not only respondents’ perceptions of me in the course of research, but also the questions I asked and assumptions I had of them. Of these features, my ethnic (Vietnamese), national (American), and regional (southern Vietnamese) identification seemed to most obviously yield moments of insight, advantage, and disruption in the field. My American upbringing often served as a point of fascination and even exoticism for those who had traveled to the U.S. and those who still dreamt of going, and often segued into questions about my thoughts on life in Germany versus the United States.22 At times, my national belonging facilitated discussions of coethnic relations of key interest to me: for instance, a former contract worker woman at temple, after being introduced to me, said “they object fiercely to the [Vietnamese] regime over there [in the U.S.],” before asking how “someone like

[her]” would be treated walking down the street in the Vietnamese communities in .

Such perceptions of life in overseas Vietnamese communities fit Helen B. Marrow’s finding that

“migrants are now embedded within a social field that connects flows of people and ideas across several different receiving countries,” here, with Vietnamese-origin individuals in Germany exhibiting familiarity with the politics and goings-on of Vietnamese in America.23

If my American nationality elicited a certain curiosity, my biography as a child of an

Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) soldier who served in a “re-education” camp granted me special access to a particular segment of Vietnamese in Berlin: veteran boat people. The weight of this access was unforgettable when I realized how Vietnamese non-southern researchers fared in trying to study refugees. In one poignant instance, I visited a respondent at

7 her workplace while her acquaintances, two boat refugee men in their 60s, skimmed through a survey being conducted by social scientists at a local institution. The principle investigator and research assistant conducting the survey both hailed from the northern regions of Vietnam, and had confided in me months earlier about their fears of refugees’ instinctive distrust of them. Sure enough, the two men felt the survey to be invasive in its questions about political, religious, social, and psychological attitudes. They concluded that the researchers surely intended to pass along their information to the Vietnamese Embassy and had to be communist, as both came of age in Vietnam in the northern region—even though one of the men originally came from the

North and spoke with a clear northern accent, himself. In defense of the research team, whom I knew personally, and of the ethics of social scientific investigation more broadly, I insisted these questions aimed to glean a portrait of individuals as it relates to certain health outcomes, and their signatures were necessary to justify the small compensation given to respondents for their time. I emphasized that their confidentiality would be ensured. Because the men remained skeptical, I pointed out that I had just interviewed one of them a few hours earlier, asking similar questions concerning politics, religion, and his migration history. To my astonishment, he remarked that I am allowed to ask him because I am the child of southerners, specifically an

ARVN soldier, and grew up in the U.S.; had I been a Vietnamese national, he “would have strangled [me].”

While my very apparent southern Vietnamese accent granted me access to former boat refugees and their families, it did not appear to harm my capacity to reach former contract workers or people from . Admittedly, this may reflect a level of naïveté on my part, as I will never really know what respondents withhold or sugarcoat in my presence. In at least some instances, however, I recognize the friendliness of northerners as signaling political

8 allegiances. For example, I asked a former contract worker if non-members could attend his organization’s upcoming event, to which he explained: “You’re invited. Do you know why?

Because you’re a child of the south.” He insisted I had not been marked by communism in the same way he and his contemporaries had, and consequently—to him—I lived more freely and honestly than the northerners in the room who came as contract workers. At the same time, my separation from Vietnam and the war through migration and time meant that some former contract workers readily felt comfortable telling me that boat refugees who continue to wave the

RVN flag are “uncivilized,” “uncultured,” and that the younger generation such as myself do not concern themselves with such matters.

However, my intersecting identities and research interests proved cumbersome when meeting some individuals for the first time, especially during earlier phases of data collection in the summers of 2013 and 2014. In these days, people who spoke to me and learned I was a researcher replied that they did not “know about those things [politics]” nor did they want to get in trouble with some unspecified authority, as suggested by one woman who gestured with her hand chopping down on her other wrist. Suspicion of me or fear of consequences of speaking with me dwindled as I became more of a stable fixture at various community events and spaces, but ultimately, I have been much less successful at recruiting those who would rather not discuss politics, or those who identify as more or less apolitical. To understand the complex histories of

Vietnamese migration to Germany, and the tenuous situation of some of the Vietnamese-origin population today, I next provide a historical overview of migration.

Vietnamese Migration to (West and East) Germany

Boat People and Family Reunification

9 Within a few years after the conclusion of war against Americans in Vietnam, roughly

1978 onwards, those unwilling to stay under the government of the newly reunified socialist country began to flee by sea. The mass departure of Vietnamese by boat sparked a humanitarian crisis that the US, France, and allied countries, including West Germany, sought to address through concerted efforts to rescue and resettle boat people. One well-known intervention was

Cap Anamur, a West German ship that rescued many overcrowded boats at sea in the early

1980s. Boat people from Vietnam resettled in the FRG under the stipulations of Articles 2-34 of the 1951 Geneva Convention. The FRG firstly provided temporary residence, then permanent residence and naturalization for the officially recognized refugees, who received welfare provisions such as job training and language classes.24 These extraordinary provisions were in part because Germany initially accepted Asians only as part of a “contingent” group of

10,000.25 By 1979, the government had expanded this quota to 20,000, and the numbers of refugees grew to 38,000 by 1984 and even more still after family reunification.26

Contract Workers

The end of combat in 1975 did not accompany the end of economic distress in war-torn

Vietnam. In an effort to ease unemployment, transfer skills, fill labor shortages, and alleviate trade debts with its allies, the government of the reunified SRV formalized its preexisting worker-training program with Germany through a bilateral contract worker agreement in 1980.27

Vietnamese represented a plurality of the number of contract workers in the GDR that would increase tenfold in the 1980s.28 Unlike refugees, who were intended to integrate into West

German society, the contract workers were not meant to intermingle with East Germans. Their goal was, in the first wave of contract worker migration, knowledge transfer, and, later, primarily filling a labor shortage.

10 In contrast to the expressed solidarity between socialist workers of the world throughout the Cold War, reunifying Germany no longer received Vietnamese workers warmly. In the transition to a market economy, the reunified government of Germany began offering an incentive of 3,000 German Marks to contract workers to return to Vietnam.29 The promise of severance pay, together with the threatening reality of deportations, meant that the number of

Vietnamese contract workers dropped steeply from 60,067 in 1989 to only 21,000 a year later.30

Moreover, Vietnam from 1990—1995 refused to accept voluntary returnees who had applied for asylum after witnessing the collapse of a socialist regime. For some years, tens of thousands of workers lived in uncertainty, having no residency or means of earning a wage, as former GDR companies reduced their workforce or closed their factories, laid off, and sought to repatriate nearly 40,000 Vietnamese.31 Those intending to stay through the 1989 Foreigner’s Law required proof of social security contributions, a place to live, and German language competence.

Moreover, the stipulation regarding clean criminal records was complicated by the rise of what newspapers referred to as “cigarette mafias” [Zigarettenmafia]. Having lost their jobs and still being refused work permits to western Berlin after reunification, some Vietnamese turned toward smuggling cigarettes from across the border with the former Soviet Union and selling them without a license.32 News reports of illicit cigarette trading, gang wars, and shoot-outs in the eastern Berlin neighborhoods of Marzahn and Lichtenberg emerged throughout the 1990s, painting a stigmatizing portrait of former workers.33 I return to this critical juncture of the

Mauerfall and black market activities in the second half of the findings, after first discussing

Vietnamese-origin individuals’ reading of the state of coethnic relations in Berlin.34

Regionalisms as Cultural and Historical “National Pastime”

11 In examining coethnic relations among Vietnamese-origin individuals in Berlin, it became immediately apparent that the defining category of difference expressed organically by respondents was that between “North” and “South.” For example, as soon as I walked into a temple in northeastern Berlin one morning to help prepare for the upcoming Lunar New Year, one woman sitting on the floor wrapping a rice cake explained to another: “Germany has reunified, but north and south haven’t reunified.” These regional antagonisms have been described by Bernard B. Fall as a favorite “national pastime.”35 Regional categories that persist today partially trace their roots to differentiated rule under French occupation. The French conquered what is today (Cochinchina) in the 1860s, but did not gain control of northern (Tonkin) or (Annam) until roughly two decades later. While

Cochinchina became a direct French colony, Annam, Tonkin, and parts of and became Indochinese protectorates. Those living in these five areas had varied administrative experiences.36 The creation of North and in 1954 then cut across former Annam, thus forcibly aligning those living in the central region with either North or South.37 These administrative divisions, in tandem with the fact that Vietnam’s terrain changes dramatically from north to south, facilitated the development of local cultures. Consequently, respondents in this study justified regionalism through the language of culture, history, and politics. I consider each of these in turn.

1. Cultural Expressions: Accent and Cuisine

Firstly, Vietnamese-origin individuals often rationalized any perceived coethnic divisions as stemming from idiosyncrasies in “cultural” traits such as accent, food, and social behavior. At a Lunar New Year celebration of one refugee organization, for example, Nga, a recent migrant from southern Vietnam, mentioned how relieved she and her friend were to find an organization

12 where they could hear southern accents. Particular terminology and accents in Vietnamese mark individuals—sometimes deceptively—as hailing from certain regions, but for the most part do not actually impede communication.38 To Nga, accents matter insofar as they signal familiarity or lack thereof, without necessarily connoting deeper social subtexts. Thus, respondents remark on accents as neutral, incidental outcomes of socialization.

Respondents also explained differences as simply a matter of taste and preference, as when northern respondents have repeatedly mentioned that southerners prepare savory foods as though they were sweet desserts, with large amounts of sugar. These comments may seem innocuous enough, but further examples of food talk demonstrate the historicization and sometimes moralization tied to culinary traditions. This is exemplified by a conversation with

Anh, one of very few southerners who regularly participates in a cultural organization for predominantly northern former contract workers. Anh suggested at a planning meeting that they should offer a variety of new dishes at each event, instead of preparing “the same six meals… over and over.” Recalling later how another member rudely dismissed her recommendation, Anh complained that the organization consistently makes boring food. Walking alongside us during this conversation is Hạnh, who traces her roots to northern Vietnam. She gingerly reasoned that southerners have a wider culinary range, resulting from their upbringing in the fertile Mekong

Delta, compared to restricted resources in the north.39 In contrast to remarks about differences in accent, food talk trended at times toward moralizing: While Anh finds virtue in the range and diversity of southern cuisines, Hạnh diagnoses the lackluster offerings of northern dishes as stemming from scarcity. She therefore defends and elevates northerners who had to make do with limited resources, compared to southerners who have taken for granted plentiful land.

2. Accidents of History: Scarcity and Location

13 Famines did ravage North Vietnam, and South Vietnam did experience comparative prosperity in part because of American financial support; however, respondents often committed the misstep of interpreting individual-level actions as inevitable byproducts of these group-level trends. This became most apparent in conversations about practices at Buddhist temples: For instance, a southerner who migrated through family reunification for boat refugees recalled bristling at seeing northerners, who she disparagingly refers to as bắc kỳ, make a big show of their wealth and donations at temple. Similarly, Hồng, who migrated from southern Vietnam in

2000, described northerners’ presumably immodest behavior at temple:

Southerners donate in a way so no one notices. We slip money [into envelopes]

like we’re offering from our devotion, not showing it off for everyone to see. But

northerners, do you know, have a dish with offerings of pastries, fruits, this and

that, and money exposed… they kneel next to their offering dishes [in the prayer

hall]. They pray and then they take the dish home.

Hồng painted a scene in which northerners allegedly chant loudly, asking for all manner of luck in their financial and social lives, only to then take the bulk of their offerings back home.

Tempering her rhetoric, Hồng also offered that because poverty was endemic in their region, northerners became accustomed to overcompensating with exaggerated displays of piety, but could not actually afford to part with the food and gifts they brought.40 On the whole, ostentatiousness tended to be a classed descriptor ascribed to northerners, rather than southerners. This association reflects a reality in which some former contract workers who achieved enviable success through entrepreneurship are now seen as exercising their means to consume conspicuously.

14 In addition to seemingly homeland-based outcomes of socialization such as accent, food, and behavioral norms, respondents also drew on the physical separation of refugees and contract workers before the Mauerfall as explaining inertia in bridging community. Bích, a child of boat refuges, poignantly argued that the people “over there” planted their roots and have their own lives in the eastern part of the city, where they originally settled. Such explanations naturalize the historical trajectory of many contract workers being relegated to the east as a result of discrimination in work and housing during and after German reunification.41 Freedom of movement was deeply constrained for contract workers in a way it simply was not for

Vietnamese refugees or East Germans after the Mauerfall. To invoke residential or locational

“preferences,” then, elides structural barriers that remained in place after the physical disappearance of the Berlin Wall.

3. Politics as Socialization: Foreign Intervention and (Anti)Communism

I have argued thus far that respondents across regional and migratory backgrounds cite cultural upbringing and the perceived accident of location in the city of Berlin as points of coethnic differentiation. Yet, these explanations expose a mental schema in which respondents map environmental, historical, and spatial logics onto character traits and individual behaviors.

For instance, multiple respondents offered stereotypes of northerners and southerners as manipulative versus naïve, calculating versus permissive or hedonistic, respectively. As with food, the logic that follows is that poverty in the North versus the financial support of the South by foreign powers caused Northerners to become shrewder and more instrumental in their relationships compared to Southerners.42 Epitomizing this point, a recent marriage migrant from northern Vietnam expressed that she preferred to have friends from the south because they “live more honestly.” In another instance, an older man from southern Vietnam contrasted hospitality

15 in both regions: whereas northerners invite others to eat out of formality, he claimed, southerners really mean it, and will physically pull you into their homes and forcefully put food on your plate. Conversely, as a result of allegedly being spoiled by the sun, wealth, and cultural exchange with Americans, southerners are painted as more “relaxed,” though perhaps unwisely so, and indulge in food and rest in ways that jeopardize planning for the future.

Even when well-intended, positive stereotypes such as “generous” and “easy-going” obscure heterogeneity within groups and reduce complexity within individuals. When ill- intentioned, labels can become dehumanizing. In one powerful example of this, a recent migrant from northern Vietnam suddenly found herself without lodgings after a falling out with her landlord. Detailing to me their conflict and why she left, Xuân exclaimed that her landlord was

“simply too evil,” and she should have known better than to live with “a centraler.” By locating the landlord’s shortcomings in her origins in central Vietnam, Xuân typecasts certain bodies as fundamentally untrustworthy. Xuân’s comment further reveals the complicated cultural and historical—rather than strictly political—roots of Vietnamese regionalism. Interestingly, Xuân herself has acknowledged this historical rift, insisting that centralers caught between the two great powers of North and South during the war suffered the most and therefore deserve the most sympathy. Yet, in a moment of discontent, she deployed generalizations that she herself acknowledged to be problematic. I return to negative stereotypes of coethnics in the final part of the findings, and emphasize here simply that, based on a pseudo-psychological reading of historical happenchance, Xuân concluded that centralers must commit all manner of usury to eke out a living. Her comment did not go unchallenged, however, as a third party to our conversation offered that there are good and bad people everywhere.

16 In sum, respondents across regional origin, migratory experience, and age expressed these same dialectics of north and south as uptight/relaxed, wily/forthright.43 This is not a testament to the veracity of such descriptions, but rather to the converging logics that respondents from different backgrounds deploy to understand for themselves the fall of the RVN and the state of the communist party in Vietnam today. One fitting example in this regard is

Liên, the wife of Tùng from the opening vignette. Like her husband, Liên is a northerner disillusioned with the lack of opportunity she perceived for herself in Vietnam and what she described as cronyism rampant under communism. She fiercely insisted that she “would rather see the [RVN] yellow flag with the three stripes than the [current] red flag with the yellow star.”

Tùng further speculated that, had the RVN won the war, “Vietnam today would even greater

[economically] than .” Tùng and Liên’s musings demonstrate that the nation of South

Vietnam, reimagined through the bodies of inhabitants of the south, present an idealized counter to the corrupt politics that they see personified by the Vietnamese government with its capital in the north—and from which they want to distance themselves. The conflation of communism and censorship with the north continue today, even as mass protests rage throughout the whole of

Vietnam.44 So, too, persists the conflation of south and anticommunist, even though there were convinced communists and sympathizers in South Vietnam.45

On one hand, this equation of northerners with communism should seem unfounded considering, as one southerner explained, that “most of the people who write against Vietnam today are northerners.” In fact, nearly all the contract workers and some refugees in this study problematized this mapping of northerner with communist. Yet, individuals of northern background themselves often reproduced these analogies, even while lodging fierce criticisms of communism and the one-party Vietnamese government. Phước, the child of a northern contract

17 worker who fought in the war, for example, recalled how the experience of seizing Sài Gòn on

April 30, 1975 changed his father. Influenced by propaganda, he explained, his father fought to liberate the “suffering” South. But once he arrived in the city and took in its architectural and cultural splendor, realized he “had been duped”—an “oh shit” moment, Phước half-joked. One consequence of this experience was that his father stopped believing in the revolution and in his god. Yet, when defining what he meant by communism, Phước listed: Vietnamese, northerner, person from —descriptors that fit him. Ngọc, also a child of a contract worker, similarly expressed feeling “guilty” when she encounters southerners, even though she was born after the end of the war and does not support the . In the process of elaborating, she retracted and expressed, instead, feeling “unpleasant” when she thinks about how, in her mind, the communist government has harmed the country.

Phước and Ngọc, even while condemning the Vietnamese government, still bind themselves to it and its supposed shortcomings as “its” people. This does not signal a political allegiance, but rather, speaks to the prevalence and strength of meaning-making processes that paint northerners as communist, and to which many northerners in my study subscribed even when this is for them a personally inaccurate reading. This interactive process of imagining the self and coethnic others has led some such as Nam, a former contract worker, to declare: “It’s not that I’m afraid southerners will think I’m communist—I know they think that!” Importantly, then, contract workers’ or northerners’ expressed sympathy for refugee’s assumed anticommunism does not bridge them socially.

Some individuals have pointed out the irony of ongoing coethnic division despite similar political perspectives. One such person is Dũng, a former contract worker from southern

Vietnam, who said exasperatedly: “But we here [southerners] just wave the [yellow-striped]

18 flag…. But here I’m like him [northerner] and he’s like me, then who are we protesting?” Yet, most contract workers with whom I spoke, including those critical of Vietnamese communism, insist that (anti)communism is the reason southerners and refugees refuse to mix with (northern) former contract workers, who they allegedly see as having “communist roots.” Subsequently, I consider the role of perceived premigration politics as it has historically affected coethnic relations.

Critical Junctures: Conflict and Cooperation after the Mauerfall

The Mauerfall represents an important moment in the history of Vietnamese-origin communities in Germany and Berlin in particular, marking both the first mass encounters and signs cooperation and, later, conflict, among refugees and contract workers. During German reunification, many contract workers either in former East Germany or the Soviet Union tried to claim asylum to remain in Germany. One such “wall person” [tương nhân] was Nghĩa, who left

Vietnam through a labor contract. He recounts applying for asylum in 1991 in the west of

Germany, where he attended a Vietnamese karaoke event with boat refugees. He was dismayed to hear the them say: “‘We came here to live in Germany as refugees and now we have to hear these communist songs’…. They themselves are creating this distance.” Nghĩa was one of several contract workers who, in recalling the events after the Mauerfall, contradicted the claim that refugees had come out en masse to help contract workers by clarifying that refugees had only helped family friends they already knew from the south. Refugees were willing to engage with contract workers, Nghĩa explained, but only when their regional affiliations matched.

Nghĩa’s wife, Trinh, also crossed into Germany from a Soviet satellite, and similarly assessed refugees as being very prejudicial toward northern contract workers.46 She reasoned that refugees display this when “they comment on [her] northern accent, about communism, and the way they

19 refuse to go to [a Vietnamese market in the former East].” Unlike her husband, however, Trinh recalled that refugees showed up to help those filing for asylum. Nghĩa then responded that visiting the refugee camps and talking did nothing to help anyone, but Trinh countered that considering how much southerners hated them, it showed a tremendous amount of generosity that they came out to talk at all.

Many contract workers like Trinh expressed understanding toward refugees’ persisting resentment, voicing sympathy for the plight of boat people who lost their country. Even Sơn, who does not approve of refugees bringing out the yellow flag, old army uniforms, and other reminders of the war, acknowledged that refugees who return to Vietnam are to this day derided as “reactionaries.” Similar to Sơn was Hiền, a contract worker who first attended university in

Germany and then returned as a group leader for a contract work contingent. Hiền disagreed with how the Vietnamese government treated the defeated officers of the ARVN, locking them up in political prisons for years. Having lived half his life in Germany, Hiền contrasted the two reunifications of his homeland and hostland by telling the story of a German acquaintance who was imprisoned by the East German police:

[T]he Stasi…wrote down everything about people who had the idea of opposing

the regime…. When that was done they would alert the union or others to follow

these people, and these people could lose their jobs, be followed, arrested, etc. So

this man [my acquaintance] …was arrested and held by the police for six months.

Until unification…he looked at the files people had written about him, when they

followed him, etc…. The important thing is when I asked him, ‘Do you still resent

them?’ ‘No, they’re just people, they’re victims, too.’ From that I learned that if

there’s reconciliation then we’ll return to ourselves, we’ll let go of the resentment

20 a lot more. That’s extremely important. But we [Vietnamese] just let the time pass

and pass, just like that, just like that.

For Hiền, as well as other contract workers with northern roots, refugees resent and blame them for the loss of their country, and consider them all communists. Yet, as some recall, refugees were still willing to lend support and comfort after the Mauerfall.

For their part, the refugees with whom I spoke nearly universally claimed that they went out to “receive our ” after the Mauerfall, “not caring whether they were communist or not.” Respondents described former contract workers seeking asylum as in need of intervention, and explained their motives as simply helping “our countrymen.” Other respondents have cast doubt on this claim, however, by saying they saw contract workers as fleeing communism as they had, but at a different point in time. This alternative perspective reads asylum-seeking as a rejection of the government of the falling socialist East rather than, in contract workers’ own articulations, as a way to stay in a land that was simply more stable and economically viable than Vietnam at the time.

Others helped though noting they did so despite believing the contract workers to be “all communists.” A self-identified southerner who was born in North Vietnam and migrated in

1954, Kiều explains:

Southerners have a good heart. They hate communists. But seeing the children of

communists, they helped immediately. People complained, ‘Why are you bringing

communists into your homes, into our temple?’ They said ‘[the northerners] were

born there but… it’s not their fault.’

Kiều’s positionality makes clear that regional constructions collapse complex histories and identities: the mapping of north/south onto communist/anticommunist erases southern

21 communists or sympathizers (such as the National Liberation Front) and northern anticommunists (undoubtedly, some of those who migrated into South Vietnam in 1954). Kiều is one such northern migrant (Bắc di cư) who nevertheless paints the war in oppositions that ignore her own complicated biography.

I spend some time in what follows focusing on individuals like Kiều, whose personal backgrounds crosscut categories: southern contract workers and northern boat refugees. One example is Dũng, the southern contract worker who felt waving the yellow flag to be pointless.

He explained that during the early years of consolidation of the communist movement in

Vietnam leading up to reunification in 1975 and thereafter:

The northerners here are very dissatisfied [with the Vietnamese government].

They curse a lot. I know this…. Because here they’re discreet and don’t want to

confide. But if we’re familiar then of course they’ll say it. ‘Before ’45, this and

that happened’ to their families [in the north]. Then after that what happened,

they’ll tell everything. They’re more dissatisfied than us [southerners]…. In the

south, the worst case is they’ll arrest us [when we flee by boat after

1975]…they’ll just capture that person, but there [north] they’ll make your

parents sit in front of the police station…they’ll arrest your old mom and dad and

keep them there forever.

Yet, when he became animated speaking about people who maligned him during his time as an asylum-seeker in refugee camps following the Mauerfall, Dũng fell back on calling northerners

“those Việt Cộng”:

Those men [who walked over] registered for two, three [refugee] camps. That

means they took fake names all over the place and brought papers from

22 somewhere, I don’t know…. In general, each man had many names… He would

receive two, three portions…. Then after that Germans found out and were very

dissatisfied with this… [Germans] provided social security, insurance, shelter,

everything, and this is what these old men do…. Those northerners. We

southerners don’t do that…. Then after that my TV disappeared. They said they

took it by accident.

When I asked Dũng to clarify whether he meant that these northerners were communists, he fell back to his earlier statements: “No, [he] already explained, they are not communist.” What is clear is that communism becomes a label that Dũng maps onto all manner of negative activities, such as petty theft in the refugee camps. Though Dũng insists that northerners hate communism as well—and often more than “we southerners” do—he uses communism as a framework for expressing the worst of Vietnamese individuals’ behaviors after the Mauerfall. The description of northerners suggests they cannot help but take advantage of the German welfare state and of coethnics alike—here, by stealing his TV—because northerners have been socialized as such.

Dũng’s logic implies that despite any expressed opposition to communism or the Vietnamese

Communist Party (VCP), northerners remain products of communist socialization.47

I also spoke with boat refugees whose families originally came from North Vietnam. Tài, whose family to the South in 1954, reiterated to me no fewer than three times during the course of our interview some variant of ‘wheresoever communists go, wheresoever communists dominate, people become enveloped in lies.’ Despite his outspoken animosity toward communist ideology and persons, Tài housed nearly a dozen contract workers he met on the streets after the

Mauerfall. He says “with [his] luck, he got all northerners”—though he himself speaks with a clear northern accent. Tài complained that the people he took in nearly set his house on fire by

23 throwing lit cigarettes in the trash, and took advantage of his friendship with a video store owner to rent items that they then never returned. Quite a few boat refugees in this study drew on similar criminalization of former contract workers, reflecting a parallel of West Germans toward

East Germans.48 However, this vicious circle does not stop there, as some former contract workers pointed to more recent migrants from the central region as the actual perpetrators of criminal activity. This pathologization of the coethnic other does not simply reflect German attitudes of West toward East, but rather maps onto a hierarchy in which the more integrated

Vietnamese feel their achievements and reputations to be marred by later arrivals seen as not knowing how to conduct themselves in German society.

Conclusion

This study queried how Vietnamese-original individuals in Berlin articulate differences between themselves and coethnics from different migration streams or regions of origin, and considered when dissimilarities form the basis for conflict. While popular media and respondents themselves often attribute this perceived coethnic division as grounded in Cold War logics, I suggest that individuals reveal a far more nuanced reading of politics—even while they contradict themselves and seemingly reaffirm the Cold War mapping of North and South onto communist and anticommunist, East and West. 49

To the question of how Vietnamese-origin individuals reproduce or complicate social divisions, I have argued that culture and history matter above and beyond 20th century Cold War politics. For one, cultural expressions such as accent and food preferences are rooted in physical distance and environmental variation—ultimately the foundations of differentiated local cultures in all societies. Importantly, these regionalisms predate the introduction of communism in

Vietnam. Historical explanations of coethnic differentiation rely on the dichotomies of

24 agricultural abundance versus dearth and the perceived presence versus absence of substantial foreign assistance. Respondents at times deploy the cultural or historical arguments above to moralize about the present behavior and virtues of certain coethnic subgroups. However, animosities typically coincide with the third dimension of difference: politics.

The respondents in my study at times reproduce and reinscribe social boundaries between themselves and coethnics along the lines of politics and standing in both Vietnam and Germany.

Refugees in particular do not simply distance themselves from contract workers out of spite for perceived aggressions during the war, but out of fear of threats to the narrative of deserving, integrated citizens. In the 1970s and 1980s, refugee flight legitimized West Germany’s and

America’s “Saigon-Berlin analogy” during the Cold War.50 Yet, respondents also demonstrate that the mapping of north and south onto communist/anticommunist and contract worker/refugee categories has porous boundaries. By virtue of their birth in southern Vietnam, contract workers such as Dũng can leverage entry into refugee organizations. So, too, can northern-born, anticommunist individuals such as Tài.

Today, the desire to validate Germany’s welcome of Vietnamese refugees means that respondents draw boundaries between themselves and the coethnics they see as marring their status. These divisions are then refracted through the lens of (anti)communist politics, even when individuals believe that coethnics across migration streams presently share similar views toward

Vietnamese socialism, and the ideologies of communism, capitalism, and democracy writ large.

In closing, coethnic conflict and political rhetoric continue to serve the function of denouncing those less integrated in Germany, while drawing on age-old rhetorics and understandings of differences rooted in Vietnam.

25

1 I have replaced all names of individuals with pseudonyms. Additionally, I have intentionally withheld certain demographic details about respondents in order to avoid deductive closure.

2 Throughout the paper, I refer to individuals’ regions of origin, denoting northern and southern

Vietnam (small case) as opposed to the official regimes of North and South Vietnam from

1954—1975. However, respondents imbue these regions of origin with political characteristics and accompanying expectations about behaviors and attitudes. Therefore, even while I try to complicate this mapping, I must honor the fact that respondents often talk about “northern,”

“southern,” and “central” persons and traits as real categories.

3 The individuals in my study interchangeably referred to “our Vietnamese people” [người Việt mình] and “countrymen,” [đồng hương]. However, the vast majority of boat refugees and their families have naturalized, whereas many former contract workers have either not wanted or not been able to gain German citizenship. Therefore, I prefer the term coethnics to conationals.

4 Before the Mauerfall, those with West German citizenship or refugee status could travel into

East Germany, but not vice versa. Some of the refugees and those who came through family reunification who spoke to me had not only traveled to the East before 1989, but had recounted often meeting or befriending contract workers.

5 As with my choice of the term “coethnic,” I do not refer to these individuals as Vietnamese

Germans because not all have naturalized or—even if they have—do not necessarily identify themselves as German rather than Vietnamese or some third category, such as European.

6 Ashley Carruthers, “Saigon from the ,” Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 29

(2008): 69—70; Gisele Bousquet has similarly documented political divisions among

Vietnamese in France. However, it is extremely difficult to account for the number of presumed pro-Hanoi individuals, and they were soon overtaken by Vietnamese refugees arriving after

26

1975. Behind the Bamboo Hedge: The Impact of Homeland Politics in the Parisian Vietnamese

Community (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991).

7 Alexander M. Cannon, “Introduction: Epic Directions for the Study of the Vietnamese

Diaspora,” Journal of Vietnamese Studies 7, no. 3 (2012): 1—6; Christina Schwenkel,

“Exhibiting War, Reconciling Pasts: Photographic Representation and Transnational

Commemoration in Contemporary Vietnam,” Journal of Vietnamese Studies 3, no. 1 (2008):

36—77.

8 Erik Harms, “The Critical Difference: Making Peripheral Vision Central in Vietnamese

Studies,” Journal of Vietnamese Studies 6, no. 2 (2011): 4.

9 Yến Lê Espiritu, “Toward a Critical Refugee Study: The Vietnamese Refugee Subject in US

Scholarship,” Journal of Vietnamese Studies 1, no. 1/2 (2006): 424. Also see Body Counts: The

Vietnam War and Militarized Refuge(es) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014). For her work leading up to Body Counts, focusing on a critical rereading of Vietnamese and refugee studies, see: “The ‘We-Win-Even-When-We-Lose’ Syndrome: U.S. Press Coverage of the

Twenty-Fifth Anniversary of the ‘’”, American Quarterly 58, no. 2 (2006): 329—

352; “Militarized Refuge: A Transpacific Perspective on Vietnamese Refugee Flight to the

United States,” Pacific and American Studies 12 (2012): 20—32. Quan Tue Tran,

“Remembering the Boat People Exodus: A Tale of Two Memorials,” Journal of Vietnamese

Studies 7, no. 3 (2012): 80—121.

10 An Tuan Nguyen, “More than Just Refugees—A Historical Overview of Vietnamese

Professional Immigration to the United States,” Journal of Vietnamese Studies 10, no. 3 (2015):

87—125.

27

11 Gertrud Hüwelmeier, “Bazaar Pagodas—Transnational Religion, Postsocialist Marketplaces and Vietnamese Migrant Women in Berlin,” Religion and Gender 3, no. 1 (2013): 76—89;

Christina Schwenkel, “Rethinking Mobilities: Socialist Migration and Post-Socialist

Repatriation of Vietnamese Contract Workers in Germany,” Critical Asian Studies 46, no. 2

(2014): 235—258.

12 Espiritu, “Critical Refugee Studies,” 410—411.

13 Edward Miller and Tuong Vu, “The Vietnam War as a Vietnamese War: Agency and Society in the Study of the Indochina War,” Journal of Vietnamese Studies 4, no. 3 (2009): 5.

14 Kieu Linh Caroline Valverde, “Making Vietnamese Music Transnational: Sounds of Home,

Resistance and Change,” Amerasia Journal 29, no. 1 (2003): 36.

15 Hiroko Furuya, “Homeland Politics and Vietnamese in the U.S.: Remittances, Home Travel and Anti-Communist Activities,” In The World of Transnational , ed. Daizaburo

Yui (University of Tokyo: Center for Pacific and American Studies, 2006): 193—208.

16 Carruthers, “Saigon from the Diaspora,” 72.

17 Ivan V. Small, “‘Over There’: Imaginative Displacements in Vietnamese Remittance Gift

Economies,” Journal of Vietnamese Studies 7, no. 3 (2012): 159.

18 Ibid., 176.

19 Bousquet, The Bamboo Hedge; Carruthers, “Saigon from the Diaspora”; Christian Collet, “The

Significance of Madison Nguyen and the Rise of the Vietnamese American Voter in San Jose,

California: Analysis and Commentary,” Doshisa American Studies 43 (2007): 131—150; Louis-

Jacques Dorais, “Politics, Kinship, and Ancestors: Some Diasporic Dimensions of the

Vietnamese in ,” Journal of Vietnamese Studies 5, no. 2 (2010): 91—132.

20 Schwenkel, “Exhibiting War.”

28

21 After two summers of preliminary research in Berlin, I found only one site both refugees and former contract workers attended en masse: a Buddhist temple in the western part of the city.

Through this site, I learned of other temples in the city attended predominantly by contract workers, and through contacts further received an invitation to attend service at an Evangelical church. One shortcoming of the ethnography, however, is that I did not spend time in Catholic institutions, though Catholics represent a large proportion of those who fled North Vietnam to

South Vietnam in 1954, and later became boat refugees. However, I am assured that by focusing predominantly on Buddhists, I am accounting for the majority of those who came as refugees to

Germany: Martin Baumann, Migration—Religion—Integration: Buddhistische Vietnamesen und hinduistische Tamilen in Deutschland (Marburg, Germany: Diagonal-Verlag, 2000).

22 In preparation for a Lunar New Year celebration, for example, members of an ethnic/cultural organization requested I sing an English song so that the audience could experience “something strange.”

23 Helen B. Marrow, “In Ireland ‘Latin Americans are kind of cool’: Evaluating a National

Context of Reception with a Transnational Lens,” Ethnicities 13, no. 5 (2013): 645.

24 Gertrud Hüwelmeier, “Spirits in the Marketplace—Transnational Networks of Vietnamese

Migrants in Berlin,” in Transnational Ties: Cities, Identities, and Migrations, eds. Michael Peter

Smith and John Eade (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2008).

25 In contrast to Vietnamese, war refugees fleeing Yugoslavia were often barred from asylum, and even those Hmong accepted as refugees into Germany did not meet with the same welcome.

See Tou T. Yang, “Hmong of Germany: Preliminary Report on the Resettlement of Lao Hmong

Refuges in Germany,” Hmong Studies Journal 4 (2013): 1—14; Maren Borkert and Wolfgang

Bosswick, “The Case of Germany,” in Migration Policy Making in Europe: The Dynamics of

29

Actors and Contexts in Past and Present, eds. Giovanna Zincone, Rinus Penninx, and Maren

Borkert (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2011), 95—128.

26 Olaf Beuchling, Vom Bootsflüchtnling zum Bundesbürger: Migration, Integration, und

Schulischer Erfolg in einer Vietnamesischen Exilgemeinschaft (Münster and New York:

Waxman, 2003); Gertrud Hüwelmeier, “Female Believers on the Move: Vietnamese Pentecostal

Networks in Germany,” in Gender, Religion, and Migration: Pathways of Integration, eds.

Glenda Tibe Bonifacio and Vivienne S. M. Angeles (Plymouth, UK: Lexington Books, 2010),

115—132.

27 In terms of knowledge transfer, socialist countries participated in a complex web of exchange including but not limited to architecture, medicine, and science: Schwenkel, Rethinking Asian

Mobilities. As for filling labor shortages, Vietnamese workers concentrated primarily in textiles and machine-tooling: Bui, Envisioning Vietnamese, 123—124.

28 Thomas Janoski, The Ironies of Citizenship: Naturalization and Integration in Industrialized

Countries (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

29 Roughly equivalent to $1,735 on December 31, 1999

(http://coinmill.com/DEM_calculator.html#DEM=3000). For perspective, per capita GDP of

Vietnam during this same year was $375

(http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD).

30 Eva Kolinsky, “Former Contract Workers from Vietnam in Germany between and Democracy, 1989—1993,” GFL (2004): 83—101.

31 Wolfgang Kil and Hilary Silver, “From Kreuzberg to Marzahn: New Migrant Communities in

Berlin,” German Politics and Society 81, no. 4 (2006): 95—121.

30

32 Pipo Bui’s work focuses on where the cigarette sales happened: predominantly in the eastern

Berlin neighborhoods of Marzahn and Lichtenberg. Envisioning Vietnamese Migrants in

Germany: Ethnic Stigma, Immigrant Origin Narratives and Partial Masking (Münster: Lit

Verlag, 2003).

33 Pipo Bui, Envisioning Vietnamese. Michael Dörschel, “Vietnamese bei der Shießerei schwer verletzt: Möglicherweise Streit in der Zigarettenmafia,” Berliner Zeitung, April 4, 2000; Vera

Gaserow, “Der aussichtslose Kampf der Berliner Polizei gegen die Zigarettenmafia,” Die Zeit,

May 24, 1996; Olaf Kanter, “Vietnamesen in Angst vor den Schergen der Mafia,” Die Zeit, May

22, 1995.

34 Note here that some hundreds of individuals also came as international students to West and

East Germany in the 1960s and 1970s, funded by the respective governments of the RVN and

DRV. While DRV-sponsored students returned to Vietnam after attaining their degrees, RVN students largely filed for asylum to remain in West Germany after Vietnamese reunification.

Migration from Vietnam to Germany continues today in part because of networks and pathways established during the Cold War. Ongoing migration takes varied forms, including those who arrive without documentation, those who overstay visas, as well as ongoing marriage migration between overseas Vietnamese and those in Vietnam.

35 Bernard B. Fall, Last Reflections on a War: Last Comments on Vietnam (Mechanicsburg, PA:

Stackpole Books, 1967), 41.

36 For example, publishing laws and media suppression tended to be punished more stringently in

Annam and Tonkin than in Cochinchina. David G. Marr, “A Brief History of Local Government in Vietnam,” in Beyond Hanoi: Local Government in Vietnam, eds. Benedict J. Tria Kerkvliet and David G. Marr (Pasir Panjang, Singapore: NIAS Press, 2004), 28—53.

31

37 David G. Marr, Vietnamese Tradition on Trial, 1920—1945 (Berkeley: University of

California Press, 1984).

38 A rare exception to this is provided by Loan, who accompanied her nephew from southern

Vietnam and filed for asylum in a refugee camp after German reunification. As the only southerners in the refugee camp, Loan recalled having to “translate” what others said to her teenage nephew, and vice versa because of different vocabulary.

39 In his interviews with northern Catholics who migrated South in 1954 [Bắc di cư], Peter

Hansen finds similar mention of the “good things for us in the South, land and buffaloes.” In addition to fear of reprisal by the Việt Minh, then, these refugees also drew on experiences of famine in the North as reasons for their southward movement. “‘Bắc Di Cư’: Catholic Refugees from the North of Vietnam, and Their Role in the Southern Republic, 1954—1959,” Journal of

Vietnamese Studies 4, no. 3 (2009): 188.

40 To be clear, not everyone pathologized poverty and its effects in this direction. As one northern student argued, Buddhists in the North during the war, because of the crackdown of the communist movement on religion, had to build small, discreet temples that were often one story and in which monks truly lived a life of asceticism. In contrast, she described the big temple in western Berlin, as those in southern Vietnam today, as richly adorned and unnecessarily extravagant, not as they were originally intended.

41 Bui writes: “Enterprises terminated contracts inappropriately early or raised the rent for a bed in the workers’ dorms retrospectively, deducting back payments from workers’ paychecks.”

Envisioning Vietnamese, 130. Bui further cites an article by Der Spiegel highlighting “the discrimination the Vietnamese workers suffered… in the locked dorm to which they were assigned, where the building manager regularly cut off electricity to certain rooms….” Ibid., 46.

32

42 North Vietnam also received foreign support, namely from the Soviet Union and .

However, my respondents never noted this point, and tended instead to reproduce the binary of the poor, famine-struck North and prosperous, fertile South.

43 Again, I recognize that respondents might be appealing to my subject position as a southerner.

However, even in contexts where I have yet to open my mouth and identify myself as the sole or one of few southern Vietnamese in the room, I have heard former contract workers joke that they wish they had southerners attend their events, especially when “southern girls speak so sweetly.”

More importantly, the depictions of those socialized under communism as greedy, manipulative, and reliant on handouts reflects a broader discourse that spans countries and national-origin groups. See Mary Patrice Erdmans, Opposite Poles: Immigrants Ethnics in Polish Chicago,

1976—1990 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998); Patricia Hogwood,

“After the GDR: Reconstructing Identity in Post-Communist Germany,” Journal of Communist

Studies and Transition Politics 16, no. 4 (2000).

44 In early April 2016, the Vietnamese central coast witnessed an unprecedented biological and environmental disaster when an estimated 100 tons of fish carcasses washed up on shore. Local residents soon suspected toxic waste from the -based steel plant, Formosa, to be responsible for poisoning the fish. Before the official government report confirmed this in early

July 2016, citizens had already begun protesting both against Formosa and the perceived lack of appropriate response by Vietnamese authorities. See James Hookway, “Vietnam’s Dead Fish

Breathe Life into Protest Movement,” The Wall Street Journal, May 19, 2016, http://www.wsj.com/articles/vietnams-dead-fish-breathe-life-into-protest-movement-

1463692409; “Vietnam’s environmental disaster has killed at least 100 tons of fish: official,”

Thanh Nien News, May 6, 2016, http://www.thanhniennews.com/society/vietnams-

33 environmental-disaster-has-killed-at-least-100-tons-of-fish-official-61897.html. Protests have continued six months after the event: Mike Ives, “Outrage Over Fish in Vietnam Simmers 6

Months Later,” , October 3, 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/04/world/asia/formosa-vietnam-fish.html.

45 For an even more complicated alignment of southern, noncommunist, anti-Southern regime politics, see: Truong Nhu Tang, A Viet Cong Memoir: An Inside Account of the Vietnam War and

Its Aftermath (New York: Vintage Books, 1985).

46 I am purposefully withholding the site of entry to protect respondents’ identities.

47 Similar dynamics have been reported among Polish refugee and immigrant groups in the

United States. Erdmans, Opposite Poles.

48 After the fall of global socialism, East Germans have had to contend with former West

Germany becoming the “reference culture.” The defeated East Germans have subsequently been stereotyped as “lazy, passive, lacking in initiative and drive, sly, secretive, distrustful, discontented and having a scrounging ‘welfare mentality’” as a result of socialization under communism. Stereotypes of westerners, “Wessi,” are similarly rooted in the political- of capitalism: “humorless, selfish, materialistic and greedy.” These criticisms paint westerners unflatteringly in their outlook, but not in their actions. Hogwood, “After the GDR,”

59.

49 Sebastian Schubert, “Berlin’s Vietnamese Wall,” Deutsche Welle, November 24, 2004, http://www.dw.de/dw/article/0,1564,1408694,00.html.

50 Wilfried Mausbach, “European Perspectives on the War in Vietnam,” GHI Bulletin 30 (2002):

71—86.

34